I’ve spent much of my career working with enterprise technology, and one thing hasn’t changed: too much valuable time still goes into keeping systems, data, and processes running. AI can change that, but only if the foundations are there. Data needs to be accessible, processes need to be automated where it makes sense, and existing systems need to evolve without creating even more complexity.
That’s where operational efficiency starts.
What is operational efficiency?
Operational efficiency is about running critical processes reliably while reducing unnecessary manual work, cost, and complexity.
For enterprise technology, this definition means something more specific: how well your processes, systems, and teams move data between parts of your organization, or between your organization and outside parties like business partners or external regulators.
At the center of operational efficiency is data integration. Whether you connect internal systems, exchange files with partners, or manage API traffic across environments, the goal is still to get data where it needs to be, on time and in the format the receiving side expects. The same foundation is becoming increasingly important for AI, which depends on trusted, governed, accessible data from across the business.
When your connections work, nobody notices them. When they break, the failure ripples downstream:
- Transactions don’t get processed on time
- Files don’t arrive on time, or get lost in the pipeline
- Shipments get delayed
- Specialists drop their own work to handle the error
The teams you rely on to manage processes tend to be small and specialized. But they get stretched across dozens or hundreds of connections. Their work is invisible until something fails. Then your costs mount up.
Three patterns create most of the friction
Manual steps that no longer need an operator. Someone on your team sits between two systems and repeats the same task by hand. The task can be automated. The inefficiency persists not because automation is impossible, but because the process was designed for a different way of working.
Data that only a person can retrieve. Your data is in your system. The only path to it runs through someone on your integration team who needs to stop their work and look up this data. Two people lose time to answer one question.
Custom solutions that outlast their builders. Some organizations built bespoke integration software decades ago to solve real problems, and some of this software still runs today. Circumstances change, the technology market evolves, and the engineers who created this solution start retiring or switching employers. The same risk can emerge as teams build custom solutions using AI agents. The system may work, but maintaining it over time still depends on people who understand how it was built and how it operates.
Efficiency and inefficiency compound
Bottlenecks are not static. The longer a process or solution runs, the more time, money, and attention it consumes, and the harder it can become to replace. A manual step that costs one person a few hours every week over years becomes an institutional dependency that everyone on your team questions, and no one can easily remove.
But the reverse is true as well. A well-designed process creates momentum, turning small improvements into significant long-term gains. It frees your resources and capacity, reduces errors that are inevitable in manual work, and it creates room for your teams to take on higher-value tasks. This creates more capacity for growth.
The gap between outcomes of operations with friction and operations with embedded efficiencies grows wider every year you wait.
Target the three frictions with three capabilities
Automate what can be automated
Your specialists spend weeks repeating the same task manually. The right software can automate much of that work.
Automation shifts people from doing repetitive tasks to designing and improving the process. Tasks like transforming data between formats, validating incoming files, or routing transactions to their correct destinations can run programmatically if you define the rules once. Artificial intelligence now accelerates this even further. Configuration work that took weeks can now be drafted much faster, with AI and standards such as Model Context Protocol (MCP) helping connect AI to enterprise systems and tools. Your team stays in the loop, not as a manual processor, but as a reviewer and approver before the output goes to production.
Your gains compound. Routine tasks take less time, your teams respond to business requests faster, and new integrations go online in days instead of months.
Make the right information visible to the right people
Visibility removes a different kind of friction: the bottleneck of one person holding the data that another person needs. Integration teams field situational status requests throughout the day and night. Has the file arrived? Did the transaction go through? Is the partner connection up? All the answers exist in your system, but there’s no self-service path to reach them.
The problem becomes even more significant for multinational organizations with teams working across multiple time zones.
Modern platforms open access to operational data through dashboards, API query tools, and now AI assistants powered by large language models (LLMs), which let people find the information they need using natural language. When your teams can retrieve operational data with a no-code self-service interface, the bottleneck disappears, and the integration team can focus on its work.
Introduce flexibility into your infrastructure
Modernization is not a full overhaul, and new doesn’t always mean best.
If the processing logic works, the formats are well-established in the industry, existing connections remain stable, and the system is well maintained, you have no reason to replace it. What holds your systems back is rigidity. Mature systems can be difficult to adapt to new requirements without significant rework.
Incremental modernization keeps what works. Move workloads to the cloud where it makes financial and operational sense. Keep them on-premises where regulatory, sovereignty, or cost considerations require it. Adopt an architecture that can scale with demand. Where running the infrastructure costs more than it returns, delegate it to a vendor that specializes in it.
The result: more time and resources for what matters
Each capability addresses a distinct source of friction.
Your integration teams spend less time on maintenance. You can plan around business priorities instead of operational emergencies. You free your teams to focus less on managing integrations and more on core business priorities.
Inefficiency to efficiency in practice
One of the most rewarding parts of my work is hearing the real-life stories from customers. Across industries and around the world, I meet talented people spending valuable time on tasks that technology could handle automatically. Their experiences highlight both the hidden costs of manual work and the transformative impact of automation.
A global organization operates across continents and time zones. Every Wednesday, an integration specialist in North America received an urgent call from a salesperson in Asia. They always needed to know the status of a large retail order. The answer was almost always the same: the order had gone through successfully. But providing that simple update still required someone to interrupt their work outside normal business hours.
This manual process depended on a specialist being available to provide a status update. It could be replaced with a self-service interface that uses APIs and AI to provide the right information to the right people. Sales teams get the information faster, while integration specialists no longer need to respond manually to routine status requests.
Textron, a multi-industry company, requires a high level of information security due to operating in a highly regulated space. It faced a challenge: the need to increase information security also increased repetitive manual work.
Matt Miller, IT Business Analyst at Textron, said:
“Over time, we found that we were spending more and more of our time remediating vulnerabilities and firefighting security threats such as DDoS attacks and invalid login requests. We wanted to spend less time on management and maintenance tasks and more time supporting the business.”
This goal became attainable when Textron moved its services from on-premises to the cloud, and delegated management to professional services. This transition lifted a significant overhead from the IT team, allowing Textron’s specialists to focus on the main line of business instead of sporadic maintenance tasks.
Azqore, a Swiss subsidiary of Indosuez Wealth Management, faced a similar problem from a different angle. Its specialists had to manage a solution that was built in-house nearly 40 years ago. The solution worked well for them for a long time. But then the underlying technology became obsolete. The engineers who created the bespoke solution approached retirement and left. The financial services company suddenly had to start managing a legacy IT solution, including significant investment.
Migrating to a modern, reliable, and fully supported solution helps ensure service continuity and compliance. It now also helps Azqore speed up its processes, bring more resilience to systems, and serve customers better.
How Axway enables operational efficiency
Axway has spent decades building platforms that organizations rely on for efficient operations. That experience helps us keep critical processes running reliably while helping customers modernize, automate, and prepare their systems and data for AI.
We automate routine processes while keeping people in control, and make data visible across environments, partners, and transactions. Flexible software adapts to how you deploy: your cloud, managed cloud, on-premises, or hybrid. Modernization proceeds without replacing the parts that work well.
And when you need us, we’re here to help. We provide ongoing support and services tailored to your needs, including managed services that can take on more operational responsibility and work alongside your integration teams to run, maintain, and optimize your infrastructure.
Operational efficiency is within your reach.
Learn more about operational efficiency in Axway’s guide for organizations.